Nerdy Derby Injects High-Tech DIY Fun Into Toy Car Racing

Here's what a Nerdy Derby looks like on the ground: You sidle up to a construction station where a pile of practical and crazy construction materials, along with correctly dimensioned blocks and wheels (so many wheels!), await your attention. Under the supervision of organizers, you can build and test the car of your dreams.

Once done, you take your creation to be registered. A photo of your ride is taken, and an RFID tag is attached to your car. Now the system knows who you are. Waiting vehicles are taken, three at a time, to the start gate. An Arduino triggers the start of the race and an IR sensor at the finish line registers the winner. That car's portrait is the automatically displayed on the big screen, and a new set of challengers is lined up at the start gate.

It's a real spectacle and you could hear the collective cheers and moans of racers and their friends and family as cars took first place or careened off the track in spectacular wrecks.The scope and scale of the team's work was breathtaking and judging by the packed car building area and continuous line, that work paid off.

We wanted to learn more about what when into making the project, so we reached out to the team to talk about their efforts. As it turns out, it takes a village to run a networked pinebox car race, so Wired ended up talking to ITP students/Nerdy Derby pit crew members Tak Cheung, Matt Richardson, Ben Light, Mark Kleback, Amelia Handcock, Surya A Mattu, Deqing Sun, and Oya Kosebay.

The Inspiration

The project began, says Matt Richardson, with a bit of nostalgia and an upcoming deadline. "During the summer, a group of us were reminiscing about the Pinewood Derbies we would participate in as kids and joking about what ITP’s take on a Pinewood Derby would look like," he says. Every year ITP participates in the Maker Faire, and knowing this students are on the lookout for ideas. The Maker Faire attracts the perfect audience for something like the Nerdy Derby, Richardson says, it's a family friendly event, so there are lots of kids around, and their parents are the kind of people who bring kids to an event about making things.

To run the event at Maker Faire required 10 people on deck at all times. Seven to manage the build stations, distributing materials and tools and helping racers complete their masterpieces. One to run the registration desk, one emcee to run the races and one to set cars at the start gate. "For the two days of the faire we had over 60 people from ITP at Nerdy Derby," says Cheung.

"Many late nights were spent for that event on building the track and getting the electrical hardware working," says Cheung, "It was wonderful to see for example our classmate Melissa dela Merced was building part of the track hours before flying home to see her family and build more tracks when she was back. Patrick Muth [another classmate] wanted to learn data networks and made Nerdy Derby his summer lessons."

The Track

When it came to the track, the team started with a classic pinewood car's dimensions for backward compatibility with the easy-to-find derby kits and then threw the rest out. "We knew that the look of our track had to be one of the distinguishing features of the Nerdy Derby," says Richardson.

The track was designed digitally, and cut using a CNC router. They started with a few prototypes, to test their monorail system. "We learned a lot from these earlier models after seeing cars fly off the track," says Cheung.

The final design is 40 feet long, 8 feet tall, and made up of modular parts. "This gave us flexibility to edit the track based on car performances and the ability to add different features in the future," says Cheung.

A typical pinewood derby chart will be closer to 30 feet long and 4 feet high. The larger Nerdy Derby track made for a better spectacle, according to Ben Light. "Races could be seen from very far away and the extended length allows for longer races," he says, adding that a great deal of time was spent perfecting the angle. "You want to create the right amount of drama in a race (but not too much drama, you want the cars to stay on the track)."

The Electronics

"I think one of the biggest things that separates this from your standard Boy Scouts’ Pinewood Derby is all of the 'nerdy' aspects that are built-in," says Mark Kleback, "We have the resources to track data and automate the race, so why not?"

The races are started by solenoid start gate, triggered by an Arduino Mega. The finish line is monitored by three IR sensors. This gives them precise race times. With each car tagged by an RFID sticker, they are scanned in, so the system knows who is running on each track. A Processing sketch grabs that incoming information and stores it all in a Ruby database.

The hardest part of keeping all of this system in place, says Kleback, was ensuring that all the parts worked in harmony on race weekend. With two computers running independent Processing sketches, posting results to a web server while also triggering races and scanning RFID, there were a lot of moving parts. "Everything had to work, and it had to be easy to use because when fifty people show up to build cars and race, there's no time for troubleshooting," he says. "You really have to think about what's going to work, and what's going to be resilient in an atmosphere like the Maker Faire."

The Registration Table

For a car to be part of the Derby, it needed to be introduced to the system. This was done at at the registration table. Racers gave the their name and their car's name and were given an RFID tag, says Surya A Mattu. Once that was all in the database, a Processing sketch scanned and photographed the car, creating an image indexed to the unique RFID. On the Nerdy Derby website, all of this was assembled into a profile for each car, which then waited for race finish times. "The whole process took a few seconds."

The tag that the team chose for the Maker Faire was a low-cost Mifare tag, says Deqing Sun. "The most interesting feature of the Mifare tag is that it can be used as a NFC tag," says Sun, "Which means it can be accessed by your smartphone."

The team has a prototype that allows compatible smartphones load the car's profile just by touching the car, but scheduling constraints meant that feature was cut for the Maker Faire derby.

The Building Station

Though the Nerdy Derby is compatible with a standard pinewood derby kit, Maker Faire participants were treated to a much wilder set of materials. "Since we expected about 500 cars to be made over the course of the weekend, we had to be economical about parts," says Richardson, "We found that washers made really cheap wheels and scrap foam and cardboard could be used as the car’s body."

The Nerdy Derby was a 'no rules' event. "We decided not to think much about rules or limits to the cars and let kids go wild," says Richardson. In order to ensure that the cars would at least start a race, every building table had a small segment of track so that builders could test that the vehicle would fit.

The intention in leaving things wide open was to provide a great learning experience for the kids competing. "Our approach was following 'Constructionism - Learning by Design' principle," says Oya Kosebay. "At the end you have to have a vehicle that will go along the track without falling. The component of trying to make it work with the material in hand, design, build, test and improve is the fundamental hands-on learning experience for everyone no matter what age they would be."

And build, they did. "The hardest part in making this work was keeping up with the material demand," says Cheung, "We went to the hardware store at least 10 times during the two days of the faire."

The Categories

To encourage as diverse a set of constructions, the Nerdy Derby team come up with a bunch of categories, such as 'The Underdog', 'The Tricked Out', 'The Delicious' (for edible entries), and 'The not-so-pretty.'

"We were trying an out this old saying that limitation sets you free," says Cheung, "We wanted to have extraordinary results and have kids think about cars and things in general with a new perspective."

They got extraordinary results. "Some of our tools became part of their cars, some were made with edible parts like the gingerbread cookie car, and incredibly one car didn't even have wheels and was able to make it to the finish line."

To the team's surprise, a number of people showed up at the Maker Faire with cars already built. "The challenge for us was how to judge the winners of these creative categories. Because in the end it’s always going to be about speed," says Cheung. "So at the faire we switched between a race of the fastest, a race of the slowest and a general exhibition run."

The Look

"We wanted to put on a good show and designed things beyond the track itself," says Cheung, so a team set out to design an overall look for the event. The final design focuses on big fat pixels and bright colors.

"The overall look and feel was really centered around the intersection of tradition and computing, with a focus on whimsy," says Amelia Handcock, "We approached this by combining the traditional sports-jersey-logo with the 8-bit aesthetic."

To create the uniforms, the team turned to classmates Jay Zehngebot and Hannah Mishin to screen-print the shirts that everyone wore and Jacki Steiner to create the website.

"There were more interactive elements that we wanted to embed the logo with, like using the Kinect to interact with each pixel aesthetic and having it printed on the RFID tags," add Cheung.